Thorne's a muscle man whose unthinkably solid professionalism extends beyond his call of duty: as the credits roll, he walks away from beautifully magnetic Meg Ryan after rescuing her husband from a South American jungle, his integrity intact and his heart possibly broken. Most recently, I was enamoured by Robert Mitchum in The Lusty Men, a rodeo rider in desperate love with Susan Hayward – who, much to Mitchum's melancholic pout, is faithful to another, less impressive fella.

Aspiring to either of these men would in itself be doomed. Both are outdone, however, by Thomas Fowler, the protagonist of Graham Greene's stunning 1955 novel The Quiet American. Fowler, a British journalist covering the French war in Vietnam, was played by Michael Redgrave in Joseph L Mankiewicz's 1958 adaptation. But it's Michael Caine's rendition, in Phillip Noyce's 2002 version, where the character finds its truly fitting onscreen avatar. Caine, a dependable pro whose talents are often taken for granted, gives a beautifully vulnerable, Oscar-nominated performance that might also be his best. His is the heartache that heaves most heavy.

Why? Because Fowler's had enough. He's unhappily married to a wife back home, he's an atheist, a cynic, a writer whose approach to his trade is functional and whose political outlook is wearily pragmatic. He's spent two years in a war zone that even by normal standards doesn't make sense – not only morally but aesthetically too. "I can't say what made me fall in love with Vietnam," Fowler narrates at the film's outset. "Everything is so intense: the colours, the taste, even the rain." Over dreamy dissolves and familiarly exotic music, Fowler's words set the tone, drenching The Quiet American in pathos from the get-go. For my money, Caine can provide all expository voiceovers of a rosily morose tint until he retires.

"They say whatever you're looking for, you will find here." They say. Such rhetoric is Fowler's way of channelling the world – through an imagined "other", a faceless, collective wisdom that disguises his own aphoristic scepticism. He or they aren't wrong though: in 1952 Saigon, he has found redemption. Phuong is three decades his junior, with a snooty sister too eager to arrange for her to marry a (preferably religious) man of wealth, but for now at least she is Fowler's mistress. In the film, Phuong is played by Hanoi-born Do Thi Hai Yen. As in the novel, she's a deliberately and virtually voiceless cipher: our initial curiosity to know more about her shifts to a mild bewilderment as to why Fowler's so dotingly in love with her in the first place.

One might argue that he isn't. Rather, at the age of 50-something, Fowler is in love with the idea of being loved. Caught up in an age of great uncertainty, his defensive instinct is to simplify, leaving political intrigue to others while pursuing one final prerogative – his own personal gratification – before that too fades. But this inclination to simplify also invites harm. Phuong's loyalty is less to Fowler than to what he represents: financial security. And, much to Fowler's horror, the youthful, wealthy Americans – whose wealth and youth he cannot match – are coming to town. Alongside a softly-spoken American aid worker like Alden Pyle (an excellent Brendan Fraser), Fowler is a dinosaur of old-world Britishness: too streetwise not to be self-loathing, whereas his American counterpart is too sly to even know it himself. Pyle, from the new world, says "please" and "thank you" even as he's stealing Fowler's woman – just because it's the right thing to do.

Perfectly cast … in The Quiet American, Michael Caine plays a man for whom all the world's tragedies are dwarfed by his own neuroses. Photograph: Phil Bray/AP

All of which is to say: Fowler's plight is waffle. His losing battle is against age itself. Caine, an actor whose charm always outweighed his looks, is perfectly cast as a man for whom all the world's tragedies are dwarfed by his own personal neuroses. Calamitously and sweepingly, romance obliterates all other perspectives. Perhaps our last beacon of romanticism is to idolise a flawed fool like Thomas Fowler. At 26, I'm much closer to Phuong's age than I am to his. But it's to his literary way of dealing with things, whereby his journalistic distance and well-worded cynicism become themselves romantic, that I relate so well.

Fowler's tragedy resembles in ways that of another moping romantic: Colin Farrell's John Smith in Terrence Malick's The New World. In that film, Smith meets up with old flame Pocahontas and, upon being asked if he ever found the Indies for which he set sail long ago (and breaking her heart in doing so), says, with all the allegorical heartbreak he can muster: "I may have sailed past them." In contrast, The Quiet American's narrative revolves around a more poignant point along the same arc. Only Fowler isn't sailing past his sought-after lands. The lands are sailing past him.